Last month I mentioned the Rex Whistler drawing that has been revealed, rather incongruously, in the middle of Knebworth House’s Indian collection (from the Lytton family’s time in India in the 1870s and the 1920s). I should also encourage you to come and see the Indian collection, which has been beautiful reorganised in our new exhibition space by our Archivist Jill Campbell. This collection also recently revealed a story previously unknown to us. A visitor named Rukshana Master was thrilled to discover in one of our display cases a lovely embroidered cap that she recognised as having been made by her great-great-grandmother Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla.
Dosebai was born in 1832 and was known as the first Indian girl to receive an English education. She presented the cap to my great-great-grandmother Edith Lytton in Calcutta on 14th March 1878, after Edith had praised a similar cap worn by her son. Dosebai, who travelled all over the world, made a cap of the same design for King Edward VII that she presented to the King at Windsor in 1907. Rukshana presented us with a book she has written about her great-great-grandmother, which tells the story of her lovely embroidered caps, entitled ‘A Cap for a King’. How wonderful that over a hundred years later stories like this can suddenly come to light. Knebworth House is truly a treasure house of stories.
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH